It's Better to Find It Early

“You’re here to interview our patients? What are you going to ask?” The on-duty nurse frowned upon seeing my face, which probably appeared too young to convince her. It was supposed to be a peaceful Saturday afternoon with few patients to handle. Apparently, the presence of a high school student from nowhere added an ounce of unease.

I told her that I came with permission from the head nurse and promised that I would avoid talking about sensitive topics. 

“No. 37 looks good. Let her go to No. 37’s room,” The other nurse looked up from the computer, “The rest of them wouldn’t talk to you.” She took me to the ward where Aunt Liu stayed. 

The first thing Aunt Liu told me was not that she had cancer. It was that I should study medicine.

"You've just turned eighteen?" she asked after learning I was about to begin university application, "Medicine is a good field. Hard, though. Five years of university isn't enough anymore. You need graduate school before you can work in hospitals like this."

She laughed as she spoke, sitting upright in her hospital bed with a drainage tube hanging discreetly beneath her clothes. Her husband sat quietly beside her, occasionally finishing her sentences or teasing her. A TV was left playing haphazardly like background music. It felt less like walking into a hospital ward than into an ordinary Jiangxi family's living room.

Aunt Liu had been in the hospital for a little over a month. Her surgery had taken place less than two weeks earlier, and she was recovering well enough to take evening walks around the ward. "You have to walk," she explained matter-of-factly. "It helps your body recover."

She had not come to the hospital because she suspected cancer but because of what she thought was a stomach problem. In early July she was treating her stomach in Zhejiang province, where her son worked. Just when the doctors removed a leiomyoma, they found something else from a CT scan. The scan revealed early-stage breast cancer, though she never discovered a lump herself. There had been no pain, no warning signs at all. "It was lucky," she said repeatedly throughout our conversation. "If they hadn't found it then, who knows what would have happened later."

For Aunt Liu, luck is measured in timing. "We came here on July 9 without a moment of break, so I had two surgeries in less than two weeks. Doctors removed the tumor early. I don't even need chemotherapy or other drugs," Every time our conversation drifted toward the frightening possibilities of cancer, she gently redirected it toward gratitude.

Her husband now looked after her in the hospital. Their son worked in another city and visited whenever weekends allowed. They insisted he should not come too often. "He has work," Aunt Liu said. "No need to keep running back and forth."

The family managed financially. "We have medical insurance. We have enough. We don't need our children to support us," She said this almost proudly. If we had no money, then of course our children would have to help. But since we can manage, we don't want to trouble them." It was another quiet principle she lived by: parents should continue protecting their children, even while lying in a hospital bed themselves.

Like many retired grandparents in China, Aunt Liu had spent much of the past decade helping raise her grandson. She described those years almost as another full-time job. "I retired first," she told me. "So I went to live with my son and help take care of the child. No time to travel. No time to rest. Every day was about looking after the little one." Only after becoming ill had she returned home to focus, perhaps for the first time in years, on herself. Yet she never sounded resentful.

When I asked whether illness had changed how she viewed life, she simply shrugged. "I'm already in my sixties." To her, aging itself—not cancer—was the larger story.

Lunch sat almost untouched on the bedside table. It was a bowl of red bean porridge brought from the hospital cafeteria. According to Aunt Liu’s husband, her appetite had recovered only recently. When I asked whether she followed a special diet after surgery, she laughed. "People say all sorts of things. No spicy food. No alcohol. But the doctor told me to eat everything else. 

Among all the nutrients, protein mattered most for patients with cancer. "Eggs are eggs," she smiled. "It doesn't matter whether they're ordinary eggs or expensive free-range eggs. Protein is protein." Aunt Liu was practical about recovery. Throughout our conversation, she trusted doctors more than rumors. "If the doctor says that's the treatment, then we’ll follow."

The beds next to Aunt Liu were empty. Many of the patients go home on Friday, come back to the hospital on Monday morning, and stay in the hospital for three days to receive chemotherapy. The wards would soon be crowded with people again. I asked whether patients in the ward talked to each other very much.

"Of course."

What did they talk about?

"Their illnesses."

Treatments.

Operations.

Recovery.

Doctors.

“But I don’t really get what they're talking about. Some of them are doctors. Two weeks ago I met a patient whose husband was a doctor. They knew what they were talking about,” Aunt Liu was not in any online patient support group either. "We're older," She laughed. "Those groups are for young people." Support came instead from whoever happened to share the same hospital room, or crossed paths during evening walks through the corridor. But for most of the time, the network of support was enclosed within the family.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked the question I had hesitated over all afternoon. "Has this illness made you anxious?"

She looked almost puzzled, "What anxiety?" Then she smiled, "You just need a good mindset."

Good mindset.

The phrase sounds almost too simple to explain living with cancer. But perhaps that is precisely why Aunt Liu repeated it. Not because she denied the seriousness of illness, but because she had already accepted what lay beyond her control. She spoke more about grandchildren than tumors, more about retirement than mortality, more about recovery than suffering. Illness occupied only one chapter of her life. The rest was still waiting.